Rick Perry's God

Does the Texas governor believe his idiotic religious rhetoric, or is he just pandering for votes?
By Christopher Hitchens

"I happened to spend several weeks in Texas earlier this year, while the Lone Star State lay under the pitiless glare of an unremitting drought. After a protracted arid interval, the state's immodest governor, Rick Perry, announced that he was using the authority vested in him to call for prayers for rain."

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The Crimes of Col. Qaddafi

In the euphoria of the current celebrations, we must not lose sight of the former leader's foul deeds.
By Christopher Hitchens

"In George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, his narrator, George Bowling, broods on the special horrors of the new totalitarianism and notices "the colored shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons," but also, less obviously perhaps, "the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke."

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Christopher Hitchens on Latest Book: 'Might Be My Very Last'

Prolific writer and political journalist Christopher Hitchens will release a new book this September titled Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. The first new book of essays since 2004, Arguably features a collection of essays previously written for Vanity Fair – of which he is a contributing editor – Slate, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Some titles include: “God of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment”; “America the Banana Republic”; “Why Women Aren’t Funny”; “First, Silence the Whistle-Blower”; “Iran’s Waiting Game”; “Easter Charade”; “Words Matter”; and “Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite.”

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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

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Product Description
The first new book of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, ARGUABLY offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad. Hitchens even looks at the recent financial crisis and argues for arthe enduring relevance of Karl Marx. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It reveals how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. In this fashion, ARGUABLY burnishes Christopher Hitchens' credentials as-to quote Christopher Buckley-our "greatest living essayist in the English language."

Britons Have Been Violent and Cruel for Generations

Still, England has not yet collapsed into a nightmare of destruction and despair.
By Christopher Hitchens

"I realized that the collapse of British society into a Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation and despair was still some distance off when I caught two little straws in the wind. The first was a well-framed photograph of a badly scorched bit of London, taken on the morning after a night of riots and vandalism."

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The Accidental Institution

By Christopher Hitchens

"At whose expense comes the mild irony when, this fall, the cheaply produced scandal sheet Private Eye will have an exhibition of its cartoons and pictorial covers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a building consecrated to taste and restraint?"

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Religion Is THE Problem in the Balkans

By Christopher Hitchens


"Reporting on the capture of the mass-murdering General Ratko Mladic by the Serbian government on Memorial Day, the New York Times summarized the newly created political situation like this: “Critical questions remain about precisely who protected Mr. Mladic. The pro-Western government of President Boris Tadic says it will investigate, a politically delicate examination that could lead to former government officials and perhaps even to religious authorities, since Mr. Mladic said after his arrest that he had been visited over the years by many priests.”

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The End of the Kemalist Affair

When was the last time a conservative NATO army pushed out its highest-ranking officers?
By Christopher Hitchens


"To read of the stunning news, of the almost-overnight liquidation of the Ataturkist or secularist military caste, and to try to do so from the standpoint of a seriously secular Turk, is to have a small share in the sense of acute national vertigo that must have accompanied the proclamation of a new system in the second two decades of the 20th century."
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